Needs and necessities

All this begs the question: What are the apps needed in China that aren't being developed? In Africa, apps that have thrived and made international headlines are service-oriented. They cover areas like banking, healthcare and crisis reporting. Chinese mobile application development is varied, too, but with variety comes disarray.

"There's a lot of spam out there," says Craig McMahon, a British developer living and working in Beijing. "If you look at the app store there's nearly half a million apps already available. It's really difficult for anyone to make their mark."

McMahon's company, TrainChinese, targets a niche market and offers apps for people learning Mandarin. "[We have] a flashcards and dictionary app," he begins, running through a dense list of study options. "We have a game for people learning to write Chinese characters; a pinyin training app; Chinese phrasebook apps; a Chinese numbers training application where it converts between Arabic numerals and Chinese numbers and can speak them to you, and there's a guide to reading them and a game." Ninety percent of the work McMahon has done in the last two years, he says, has been in Xcode, the programming language for Apple's iOS.

"There are companies that make apps about everything and anything. They think if they publish hundreds of things, eventually they are going to end up with a nice profit," says McMahon of the current Chinese app landscape. "But people will cotton on to these things. I trust the instincts and tastes of the consumer to pick out higher quality apps."

Sun in many ways is on the same page as McMahon. He thinks iPhone app developers should focus on fine-tuning the products they already have. "There are still [Chinese] websites that you can't use to their full potential," he says, recalling how in the past it was impossible to stream web video on Apple devices (the problem has since been fixed). "Most websites are based on the Windows operating system and don't translate well on Apple's platform." Apps offer an alternative to the mobile web browser.

Apple vs. Android

The elephant in the room – or elephants – are Apple's competitors. NetEase Tech's findings show that Google's Android mobile operating system still outpaces Apple in China, with 43 percent of the market. Nokia's Symbian OS has 22 percent. McMahon believes that app numbers will tip towards the iPhone even as Android grows. "[Android] will continue to shift more because they are going to become the lowest common denominator – in a nice way, because it's a nice system," he explains. "But it's same the reason why Windows is ubiquitous: because they license it to everybody and anyone can make a Windows machine. With iOS, only Apple can make them, they don't license to anyone else, they keep control."

This exclusivity isn't curbing sales. Chinese consumers wait in anticipation for the release of the iPhone 5 even as they mourn the passing of longtime Apple visionary Steve Jobs. As far as app development is concerned, iOS is a system Sun Li and Craig McMahon are happy to keep working on, in part due to its "luxury" qualities.

"Apple is really mean as a task master and they're quite restrictive with what you can do," says McMahon. "But at the same time, you appreciate that they're keeping their quality up, so I think we're all a bit conflicted basically."